Popular Reviews

Nuclear

After His House and A Dim Valley, Nuclear is the third film with an uneasy supernatural element that I’ve seen in the last three days. All three use the otherworldly element to put a spin on a familiar genre – two/three genres in the case of Nuclear. The first is a family drama. Mother (as the imdb calls her, and played by Sienna Guillory) gets a formidable kicking as the film opens, from her son (Brother, as per the imdb, played by Oliver Coopersmith), is rescued by her daughter Emma (Emilia Jones) and driven off into the middle of nowhere, mum to recuperate, Emma to marshal her forces before moving on to who … Read more

The Gangster

There aren’t that many films called The Gangster, which is odd considering how many gangster movies there are. But here he is, this singular malefactor, in a film noir from 1947, a strange one with a weird, distorting-mirror quality. Too arty for its own good seems to have been the general consensus at the time. I have no idea what any of those complaints are about. The odd art deco clock and building frontage to one side, there’s not much artiness going on here at all – director Gordon Wiles isn’t messing about overly with the narrative. DP Paul Ivano gives it to us fairly straight in terms of lenses and lighting. Dalton … Read more

The Card Counter

In The Card Counter we meet another of Paul Schrader’s lost loners, with Oscar Isaac joining actors as varied as Robert De Niro (Taxi Driver) and Lindsay Lohan (The Canyons) as the latest in a series of souls seeking salvation, redemption, expiation in a do-or-die struggle with their own human frailty. In familiar Schrader first-person voiceover William Tell (Isaac) explains how he learned to count cards while in prison serving an eight-year jail term for the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. Tell goes into some detail explaining how card counting works – high value cards score minus one, low value cards plus one, the other cards nothing at all – and how … Read more

Bedtime Story

Bedtime Story is one of a string of movies produced by Marlon Brando’s Pennebaker Productions, a company run by Brando’s father, Marlon Sr, and named after his mother, Dorothy Pennebaker. They didn’t all feature Brando Jr. 1961’s Paris Blues was a vehicle for Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, Sidney Poitier and Louis Armstrong. 1959’s Shake Hands with the Devil starred James Cagney. 1964’s Man in the Middle was a courtroom drama set during the Second World War and handed a lead role to Robert Mitchum. You’ve probably not heard of any of them, and apart from One Eyed Jacks, Pennebaker Productions’ hit rate wasn’t astonishing, though the films they turned out did generally feature … Read more

Medusa: Queen of the Serpents

An admission. Medusa: Queen of the Serpents isn’t the film I was after. I was aiming towards plain old Medusa, Anita Rocha da Silveira’s follow-up to Mate-Me Por Favor (Kill Me Please). Both films came out about the same time and when you type Medusa into Amazon, the covers of both films come up. Both feature a woman’s face and a greenish background. They’re pretty similar. Hence… Failure explained. Preamble over, let’s dive into a film that also dives pretty hard, and with great enthusiasm, into its low-budget ethos. It’s all set on a grim caravan site somewhere in low-rent UK, where a trio of working girls – Carly (Megan Purvis), Simone (Sarah … Read more

Days of Eclipse

Aleksandr Sokurov’s 1988 movie Days of Eclipse is often bracketed as sci-fi but there are no aliens, spaceships or weird tech in it. It’s not set in the future either. But there is something distinctly unworldly about it and it’s also based on a book by the Strugatsky brothers, who wrote the story Tarkovsky repurposed for Stalker, another movie often described as sci-fi but which also doesn’t slot right into that groove. Sokurov knew Tarkovsky, who is clearly the strongest influence on this strangely meditative movie you might call a homage to his mentor. Both feature single guys in a quasi-colonial setting. In Stalker the dude is hacking his way through a post-industrial … Read more

The General

A movie for every day of the year – a good one 12 February Art thieves steal Munch’s The Scream, 1994 On this day in 1994, thieves broke into the National Gallery, Oslo, and stole the Edvard Munch painting The Scream. It is actually one of a number of so-named works of art, there being four different Screams in a variety of media, plus a number of lithographic prints struck by Munch himself. The one stolen on the night in question was in tempera on cardboard and was in a less secure part of the gallery – it had been moved as part of celebrations held to mark the opening of the winter … Read more

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

A movie for every day of the year – a good one 9 January Lee Van Cleef born, 1925 On this day in 1925, Clarence Leroy Van Cleef Jr was born, in New Jersey, USA. Best known for his portrayal of baddies, Van Cleef served on submarine chasers in the Second World War before becoming a time and motion man after the war ended. Not looking enough like a traditional penpusher to satisfy his colleagues, Lee was persuaded by them, and his friends, to give the stage and film world the benefit of his hawk nose and eyes, each of which was a different colour, thanks to the heterochromia iridium mutation. Van Cleef’s … Read more

The Crime Is Mine aka Mon Crime

Mixing it up is writer/director François Ozon’s way. Mon Crime (aka The Crime Is Mine) sees him back on the comedic territory of 8 Femmes, Potiche and In the House, leaving his more serious, more recent movies, like Peter von Kant (a remake of a fraught Fassbinder film), Summer of 85 (a veiled autobiography) and Everything Went Fine (a drama about assisted dying) looking a little like aberrations. Farce and old-school screwball is the idea. The style borrowed from Lubitsch and Capra, the story looking like it’s borrowed from the 1926 play Chicago. Actually, it’s based on the 1934 play Mon Crime, which, it’s possible, might have leant on the same real-life source … Read more

The Bullet Train

Disaster movies summed up in one factoid: Airport (1970) to Airplane! (1980). You’re welcome. The Bullet Train comes slap dang in the middle, 1975, and though it’s often sold as being the inspiration for 1994’s Speed, which it is, it’s just as significant for being a grand summing-up of the entire disaster movie genre. Let’s deal with the Speed stuff first. A bomb has been fitted to one particular Japanese bullet train, or shinkansen (Shinkansen daibakuha is the Japanese title), on the Tokyo to Hakata route. Once the train reaches 80kph the bomb becomes armed. After that, if the speed drops below 80kph, the bomb will detonate. So far, so Sandra Bullock. But … Read more

BlackBerry

The dramatised behind-the-scenes story of the rise and demise of the company that had the world where its customers had its little black phone – in the palm of its hand – BlackBerry is so well designed, tooled and assembled that it could be used as a case study for how to make a film about something potentially as uninspiring as developer code. Things kick off in the mid 1990s with two dudes – tech dweeb Mike Lazaridis (Jay Baruchel) and tech schlub Doug Fregin (Matt Johnson) – getting absolutely nowhere pitching what they see as the future of portable communication. Their tiny startup has worked out a way to piggyback off bits … Read more